Modeling the effects of project management strategies on long-term product knowledge

Abstract

In a team, people sometimes leave the team and become replaced by new persons with less experience, and sometimes people participate in new activities and thereby obtain new knowledge. Different processes, in terms of different management strategies, can be followed, e.g., to introduce people to new tasks so they get new knowledge. There is a need to investigate the long term effects of different strategies on a team's software product knowledge. This paper presents an initial approach for how this type of knowledge can be modeled as a stochastic process. Metrics representing the long term effects on knowledge are derived, and two different example strategies are investigated numerically. Based on this it is discussed how the model can be further elaborated and evaluated. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.